I'm Posting Every Day to Overcome Pride

When I first started this Substack, I posted pretty consistently on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. That wasn’t very hard because there was a stream of news about Ukraine and Russia and I had enough time to research and write three posts per week.

But then I noticed that people seemed to get annoyed when I would put out a post just for the sake of hitting my schedule. Writing a paid newsletter sounds like a fun gig, but the feedback is immediate and often unforgiving. Send out one post someone doesn’t like and they smash the unsubscribe button.

Then I dialed back to two posts per week, and that held for a while, but there were times when life overwhelmed me or I just didn’t know what to write.

So posting for the past year or so has been somewhat irregular. I try to put out at least one post per week, but that doesn’t always work out.

The truth is, I don’t think anyone knows the optimal frequency of Substack publishing. If you look at the most-successful Substack publications, some publish ever day while others post infrequently.

Recently, I’ve been working through some mental and spiritual issues, which I’ll write about when it’s appropriate, and the conclusion I drew was that much of my misery in life, as well as my own roadblocks, comes from pride.

As a stereotypical “gifted” Millennial, I was raised with two notions:

1. I was smarter, and thus much better than everyone else, and I had to constantly prove it or otherwise be a disappointing failure.

2. That the world had a bright future and things would only get better.

The end result of these attitudes:

• A tendency to give up too easily

• Being overly hard on myself

• Being overly harsh and uncharitable with others

• Constant disappointment

• Depression

• Ingratitude

If you looked in my Substack account, you’d see 30 or more incomplete drafts that I’ve abandoned because I didn’t think they were good enough. But I think that was my own pride talking. You probably would have been happy to have read those missives, and maybe even disappointed that you didn’t receive them.

The good thing about being 40 is that those childhood pressures are finally gone. No one is going to mistake me for a boy genius these days. By and large, no one cares at all what I do, outside of my inner circle, my coworkers, and you, the reader.

And I realize that if I ever want to find actual joy in life, I have to cast away my pride and humbly accept my life and its many blessings, such as people who want to read the stray thoughts I scribble down.

So I’ve decided to try putting out a post every weekday, in part inspired by my friend and supporter Julie Fredrickson, who has been publishing blog posts every day for years now. Some posts may be short or not very good, but again, this is an exercise in exorcising my pride.

I informally polled some folks on Twitter and in our Discord and there seems to be support for this. Let me know what you think.